Everyone who has seen any news in recent times will be aware that the US authorities have released a whole lot of files regarding the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein’s indescribably depraved and horrific behaviour, and that of those around him.
I was curious where best one would actually see these files. There’s so many allegations going around about their contents on social media that I have no real way of knowing what to believe other than to default to prioritising “reliable sources” over others, whatever that means.
Having access to all of the files certainly won’t solve that problem - they’re far too plentiful and poorly prepared for any amateur to get a full grasp of the situation. But it might at least let one check that screenshots one sees on social media are indeed screenshots of the actual files as released.
Not to say of course that what’s in the files themselves is necessarily true. But at least it’s one less step of doubt. The more I think about it, the more it’s probably a pointless exercise, if I’m honest. But perhaps it’s good to have a lot of people archive copies if the allegations that some of the files are going missing from the original sources are true. But again, are they? The feeling of an epistemological crisis has never been greater to me.
Anyway - the recent files everyone’s discussing are those that were released in accordance with the “Epstein Files Transparency Act”. These come in 12 “datasets”. Set 1-8 were released in December 2025, and 9-12 at the end of January.
They are big files! Containing millions of pages of text, images etc. The textual documents are PDFs I believe. A lot of people seem to say they are only partially or poorly OCRd, so if one wants to be able to actually search through the text one might have some more work to do first.
Nonetheless, the official source to access what is in the 12 volumes would be the US Department of Justice’s Epstein Library “DOJ Disclosures”
Click on the dropdown area marked “Epstein Files Transparency Act” and you’ll see links to view the files from the twelves different datasets. All you see is a bunch of filenames which you have to click one at a time so whether that will be useful to anyone is questionable. If you’re trying to validate a particular file that you know the name of is real I suppose it might be.
They do have a search page which might speed things up, although it does come with a warning that it might not be all that reliable or comprehensive.
If you do not want to download thousands+ of files one at a time. the “WikiEpstein” has links to 9 zip files which let you download tranches 1-8 and 12 in nine individual zip files. 9-11 zips have apparently not been made available from officially sources as conveniently, so instead they link you to the Department of Justice’s page where you can download individual docs. WikiEpstein also links to some other sources of Epstein-related documents if you want more than the recent ones.
As far as downloading the whole lot in one load goes, I think the best bet is maybe the torrents that users have kindly collaborated together to create which are listed on this Github. They apparently include everything from all tranches except number 9, which is missing and estimated 0.1% of files.
Each tranche is available separately or you can go from the “Structured Dataset” which is basically the whole lot put together, structured in a way that they should 1:1 match the original DoJ files. Note that this is a huge file! Just over 200gb. You will end up with a file containing a ton of images, PDFs etc. which may be be a lot to store and sort out.
Of course in pursuing this method you are implicitly trusting that the hive-mind of data hoarders that created these archives has done so correctly and completely.
There are actually some online tools that “not government” people have kindly set up to allow one to much more easily explore what is available without downloading your own copies. Of course one needs to check how up to date each is in order to know if all 12 tranches are documents are available. The only one I found that definitely seemed close so far was Jmail - not quite up to date yet from the looks of it but they’re close and seem to be working on it. It has an “interesting” UI, set up to look like Google Suite. So you get to browse Epstein’s emails using a Gmail interface, other types of files with a Google Drive look-a-like and so on. Somehow this makes me feel even more queasy about the whole enterprise.
Once again, for any third-party solution we are implicitly relying on the people involved in setting it up having done so completely and correctly. Whilst I don’t have any personal reason to doubt that, I also haven’t spent any time trying to validate them so, as ever, caveat emptor.